This invention relates to dynamic assessment of application sharing in a shared pool of configurable computing resources. More specifically, the invention relates to mitigation of application sharing to unwarranted users in the shared pool.
Cloud computing is a model of service delivery for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computer resources, e.g. networks, network bandwidth, servers, processing, memory, storage, applications, virtual machines, and services, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or interaction with a provider of service. One of the characteristics of cloud computing infrastructure is that applications can be launched from a plurality of locations and shared with multiple users. More specifically, the cloud computing infrastructure offers a collaboration system that may serve multiple clients from different organizations. An organization may create accounts for employees, who can then communicate and share files with other system users, including users outside of the organization. However, such collaboration brings a security concern with respect to data leakage, and especially inadvertent mistakes on file sharing. More specifically, prior to collaboration across the cloud infrastructure, collaboration systems include organizational boundaries to provide a social and technical barrier to mitigate inappropriate file sharing.
Information sharing is a popular activity in a collaboration system. However, the collaboration system is not static. Users in the system change, the roles of the users in the system are subject to changes, etc. In other words, the collaboration takes places in a system that is dynamic. As such, a security system must be employed within the system to ensure and support the dynamic characteristics of the collaboration system.